Gorm Braarvig

Video attempt

2009-09-27T21:11:00.002+02:00

I just have to try and post some multi meda content. I don't have that much, so I stiched together pictures of myself early in the morning (I take them to try and motivate myself to start caring how I look: the painful way).

It was quite fun, I had "Windows Movie Maker" on my machine, which took five minutes to learn how to use.

BTW: will I see you at SQL PASS 2009?

Handling history failures in data warehousing

2009-09-18T01:14:00.004+02:00

Moved:

http://information-management-enabled.blogspot.com/2009/09/handling-history-failures-in-data.html

SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP / Windows 7 x32 – Initial experience

2009-08-13T01:19:00.002+02:00

Moved:
http://information-management-enabled.blogspot.com/2009/08/sql-server-2008-r2-ctp-windows-7-x32.html

Star Wars - turning design ideas into reality

2009-07-01T23:58:00.006+02:00

Nice presentation i found on linkedin...
The Force Behind Star Wars: Turning Design ideas into reality
...the force is stong in this one!

Deal signed with the seven-year old

2009-06-26T02:28:00.002+02:00

I have signed the deal for home rules with the kid. These rules dictates how we want shall have it at home.

Rules 1, 3 and 5 are Natalies (my girls) most important points; 2 and 4 are mine.

This should be easy, but if it is not, we will change the rules, they are written on a small white board! I put the white board on our entrance.

When we don't need the rules any more she can learn to use the white board (I am a consultant).

Here are the rules:

"Være snille med hverandre" (Natalie)
Be nice to each other (approximate translation)
"Alltid hyggelig å være hjemme" (Gorm)
Allways nice to be home (approximate translation)
"Lave stemmer når man diskuterer" (Natalie)
Quiet voices when one argues (approximate translation)
"Ha god nok tid" (Gorm)
Have sufficient time (approximate translation)
"Ikke være stressa" (Natalie)
Don't be stressed (approximate translation)

I hope we can follow the strategy up with sufficient execution. Tell me what you think.

The shortest useful program I have written: %1

2009-05-25T12:25:00.001+02:00

This is the shortest program I have written, it is two bytes:

<ExecuteCommand.cmd>%1</ExecuteCommand.cmd>

The task of this program is to execute the parameter as a program, I use this inside Visual Studio on the "Open With"-menu to call cmd-scripts inside the GUI.

The only program that comes close to this is a 5-byte boot program I wrote for 8086 assembly about twenty years ago.

You don’t know what you don’t know; the other Socratic problem; joke

2009-04-11T13:19:00.001+02:00

http://img.thedailywtf.com/images/200904/errord/server_does_not_know_why.gif

Certification ”holiday”

2009-04-09T18:03:00.001+02:00

Wow! Three certification attempts taken without any preparation (except drinking the night before taking the certs) and three past!

I am now certified dba and certified professional bi-person for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (there are about 100 of the former and about 250 of the latter according to http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/certified.mspx)

I must be born under a lucky star!

Sorry about the bragging, but I'm too happy to care!

Happy Easter,
Gorm

Get gigs of disk space with a single command in Windows Server 2008R2 (and many others)

2009-03-08T02:07:00.002+01:00

Moved:
http://information-management-enabled.blogspot.com/2009/03/get-gigs-of-disk-space-with-single.html

16 habits of highly creative people

2008-12-27T00:11:00.001+01:00

I liked this one.

http://tickledbylife.com/index.php/16-habits-of-highly-creative-people

Happy Holidays
Gorm

Plato’s cave

2008-12-01T00:30:00.001+01:00

http://platosallegory.com/ this was a good one, youtube has many versions of it. We use the cave allegory as a metaphor for Information Management.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2afuTvUzBQ is better for those interested in the actual text.

Game development with the seven year old

2008-11-16T18:58:00.003+01:00

First stage is done, 33 sketches are finished and photographed (all done by Natalie, 7).

Good times!

2008-10-29T22:52:00.001+01:00

I have little time left to blog right now, much work. Just had to get a few things off my mind…

My daughter, seven years old, has agreed to make a video game with me (flash or silverlight, I think).
The project I'm currently on at work is going into testing. The customer will finally have return.
I have now worked for a year as a regular worker in a leading IM consulting shop, and beginning to be comfortable. I have learned that there are some very smart people out there.
I'm a "SQL Heroes Community Finalist" https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/Survey/Survey.aspx?SurveyID=7231 with some routines I made for fun.
I passed a SQL Server 2008 beta exam.

… that's just a few of the things going on, I feel good

Have a nice day, Gorm!

Virtumondo/Virtumundo – virus hunt, continued

2008-08-19T11:29:00.001+02:00

I couldn't remove this virus. I might if I had the system CD, so that I could start up without starting the logon process (virus uses winlogon notifiers). Here is, however, some information in case people want to pursue this:

Functionality is in a dll named "__c00*.dat", where the star is a number in hexadecimal format and

MD5=6717D534A44C9913FFFE9985EE7E933F:

It "calls home" to "nx1.zappoworld.com", which is based in the Netherlands.
Error output from the file can be found in "c:\xcrashdump.dat"
Files it hooks on are:
- iexplore.exe
- explorer.exe
- services.exe
- winlogon.exe
- firefox.exe
- opera.exe
Functionality includes
- HttpSendRequestA (call home)
- CreateWindowExA (show information)
- SetWindowsHookExA (log stuff, I suspect key logging)
- UrlDownloadFileA (download more stuff to update it self, maybe)
- CreateMutex (I guess so that only one instance runs)
- WriteProcessMemory (don't know, looks evil)
- GetProcAddress (load what ever functionality from dlls, I couldn't find LoadLibrary, however)
- CreateRemoteThread (looks bad)
- Process Management and file management
- Registry functions
- String handling, both from shell api and native, both ANSI and UNICODE
- SetSecurityDescriptorDacl

MD5=69FEB378121DB99F80E15D597EC60124

Lingvo9Netpatch from 2003
LocalAlloc and VirtualAlloc (memory allocation functions without their freeing counterparts) #"¤#""¤ memory leaks?
OpenFile
C-runtime functions
Looks sloppy written
Not detected by any virus scanners I've tried!

Analysis done with FileAlyzer.

So, I'm off to support so they can wipe my machine. ¤#"%"#"!%"#¤@work.

Zappoworld.com…
Flashget.com catch url…

BTW, I found a nice hosts file at: http://mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm, http://mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt

Virtumondo – virus hunt

2008-08-17T22:58:00.001+02:00

Removing virtumondo.

The other day I got an unsuspected pop up window using Internet Explorer. Strange, I thought, this kind of problems must be extinct years ago, I surely did something wrong…?

The problem was pervasive.

I use a virus killer and a firewall , and I don't install software I'm not supposed to, except maybe Opera and Java.

I tried spyware killers of Google and Microsoft. It worked. One day later, the problem reappeared… and in addition they reported (and did not fix) a virus named "Virtumondo"!

The net is full of fixes and people telling stories of hours of work without result. Except the obvious, two "low hanging fruits" emerged:

1. Blocking Virtumondo.com and all popping up sites in %windir%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

2. Removing write-access to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Notify"

I then restarted into safe mode with command prompt, ran anti virus, and removed all (three) reg keys under "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Notify" starting with "__".

That's it, I don't feel certain I removed the malware, but this is all I have time for, if the thing reappears I guess I'll ask for a new machine or full reinstall.

Tomorrow will be better.

Hyper-V on the laptop (Compaq nc6320)

2008-07-25T12:12:00.001+02:00

I want to run Hyper-visor and other software (SQL Server 2008) on my laptop. I consider running Team Foundation Server, Windows XP, SQL Server versions, old Visual Studio versions, Visio, BizTalk and others inside Hyper-V images on my laptop. At the same time I want the laptop to function as normally (internet explorer, media player, office, etc).

Hyper-V runs on 64-bit Windows Server 2008. The machine needs to support hardware-assisted virtualization and data execution prevention, and these must be enabled in BIOS.

Download driver packages for Vista x64 and save on flash-drive
Install Windows Server 2008
Rename computer
start control userpasswords2 and enable automatic logon
Install drivers and enable wireless service (not automatic on server)
1. Install Intel Graphics sp37719
2. Install "Integrated module with Bluetooth wireless technology for Vista" SP34275 don't care if it says "no bluetooth device"
3. Replace wireless driver: \Intel Wireless sp38052a\v64
4. Add feature "Wireless..."
Connect to internet
Start updates
get updates for more programs
automatic
important updates, only
View available updates
Add optional: Hyper-V
Install Hyper-V
Add role Hyper-V

The machine is now a Hypervisor. Next steps are to get Windows Server 2008 to act more like a client OS.

Install other drivers
1. SoundMAX SP36683
Install Feature "Desktop Experience" (Media Player, etc)
Create shortcut "net start vmms" for starting Hyper-V and "net stop vmms" for stopping Hyper-V
Set startup for service "Hyper-V Virtual Machine Management" to manual
stop vmms
Install Virtual PC 2007 (in case I want wireless network from a vm)
Enter product key and Activate windows

Since I have a working version of Windows, this is the time to activate, next step would ideally be to install office. I don't have office handy (am on vacation), so I install the viewers for Word, PowerPoint and Excel

I am now ready to install Visual Studio and the servers, first out is SQL Server 2008 rc.

Set up IIS (with all the iis6 stuff)
Set up Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 x64 with Service Pack 1 to run "stand-alone"
(optionally) set up Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Templates – 20070221
Create user ServiceAccount to run all the sql server services
Install SQL (complete) with RS in SharePoint integrated mode
Open firewall (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=94001)
open tcp 1433 (engine), 2383 (ssas), 80 (sp), 135 (ssis), 443 (https), 4022 (service broker)
udp 1434 (ssas)
and "notify me when new program blocked"

Now get all updates.

Next step is to install Visual Studio, which should be straight-forward.

OK, I'm off to the beach,
Gorm

CMD: redirect error output

2008-07-15T23:41:00.002+02:00

Moved:
http://information-management-enabled.blogspot.com/2008/07/cmd-redirect-error-output.html

ETL top-down 1 – Architecting abstraction layering

2008-07-13T19:14:00.002+02:00

Post moved to http://information-management-enabled.blogspot.com/2008/07/etl-top-down-1-architecting-abstraction.html

Quotes from “The BI Consultant” / “Chief Sitting Bull”

2008-06-27T18:05:00.001+02:00

I stumbled over "Quotes from Chief Sitting Bull" on wikimedia and found myself identifying me with him, only
I am "Consultant surviving in customer (person) land",
Not "Indian surviving in white man's land".
It has a bit of recession-talk in it, <recession> embossed </recession>, I had to mark it, since I, knock on wood, have not seen any signs of recession.

Quotes from The BI Consultant

I am here by the will of the Great Ability, and by his will I am Consultant.

I know Great Ability is looking down upon me from above, and will hear what I say...

The earth has received the embrace of the sun and we shall see the results of that love.

He put in your heart certain wishes and plans; in my heart, he put other different desires.

In my early days, I was eager to learn and to do things, and therefore I learned quickly.

Each man is good in the sight of the Great Ability.

It is not necessary for eagles to be crows.

<recession>Now that we are poor, we are free. No Customer controls our footsteps. If we must die, we die defending our right. </recession>

<recession> What Customer can say I never stole his land or a penny of his money? Yet they say that I am a thief. </recession>

<recession> What Customer, however lonely, was ever captive or insulted by me? Yet they say I am a bad Consultant.

<recession> What Customer has ever seen me drunk? Who has ever come to me hungry and left me unfed? Who has seen me beat my wives or abuse my children? What law have I broken?

Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am Consultant? Because I was born where my father lived? Because I would die for my people and my country?

God made me a Consultant.

I want to tell you that if the Great Ability had chosen anyone to be the Consultant of this country, it is myself.

<recession> When I was a boy, the Consultant owned the world. The sun rose and set on their land; they sent ten thousand men to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them? </recession>

<recession> You think I am a fool, but you are a greater fool than I am. </recession>

If the Great Ability had desired me to be a Customer, he would have made me so in the first place.

<recession> I was very sorry when I found out that your intentions were good and not what I supposed they were. </recession>

<recession> If a man loses anything and goes back and looks carefully for it, he will find it. </recession>

Changes:
Chief Sitting Bull -> The BI Consultant
Chief -> Consultant
Spirit -> Ability
white man -> Customer
white woman -> Customer
Indian -> Consultant
Sioux -> Consultant

Google Treasure Hunt 2008 – 3, 4

2008-06-08T00:00:00.001+02:00

No time (I guess they all say that). Besides, I have a job already. Good luck to everybody.

Google Treasure Hunt 2008 - 2

2008-05-21T00:45:00.001+02:00

I read somewhere there were four rounds total, I now have the two first correct: d0d696, 7602f9

<reply>

Thank you for entering the Treasure Hunt! Below is the entry we received. You can enter as many times as you like (start over to get a new question). Save your confirmation code so you can check on the status of your entry later.

Confirmation code: 7602f9

Your email address: spam.me@live.com

Your question: 2 sums from 70933637679287891xx.zip: line 3 in *pqr*.rtf, line 4 in *zzz*.js

Your answer: 16123822xx

Time received: 2008-05-20 22:29:22.867978 UTC

Correct answer: 16123822xx

Your answer was: Correct

Your answer was correct! Congratulations, you're part-way there.

There will more questions over the coming weeks, and the first person to answer them all correctly will win a prize, so keep trying!

</reply>

Surveys conducted for free

2008-05-18T14:15:00.002+02:00

I sometimes need to do a survey without having a budget (e.g. for the school of my children), I've used excel and email. This has meant a lot of work. I answered a survey for family to get on a list for early adoption of a coming google product and found this link:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/newform

here you can design your survey:

Which results in a survey:

Laster inn...

And a spreadsheet:

Timestamp	Enter your email
18.05.2008 kl. 05.12.01	spam.me@live.com

Incredible!

Congratulations Google.

Google reader on the phone

2008-05-18T13:46:00.001+02:00

I use google reader for reading blogs. I like it. Going through the settings, I found that reader can be used on the phone. I've tried gmail on my phone (Windows Mobile 5) and wasn't impressed so I had low expectations.

I got (almost) exactly what I wanted:

<mobile_screen>

Leser

Gorm Braarvig sin leseliste

1	Google Treasure Hunt 2008 – and some Google App Engine - <center> Gorm Braarvig</center>
	*merk disse elementene som leste*

Etiketter | Abonnementer

gorm.mail@gmail.com | Innstillinger | Logg ut

Flere Google-produkter

</mobile_screen>

Only thing I'm missing is a setting to disable the scroll bar (number of items can be 5, 10 or 20; I would like an additional choice "auto" that fed me the number of items that fit on my screen). Should be reasonably straight-forward to guesstimate how many goes on the screen: they know how large the client area is and how much a one-liner, two-liner and three-liner takes, and (roughly) how much goes on a line.

I tried the other products too. Nice:

<mobile_screen>

Google mobilprodukter

Søk

Gmail

Kalender

Nyheter

Bilder

*Tips: Legg inn dette bokmerket for å få rask tilgang til Google-tjenester.

Ikke i Norge?

Vilkår for bruk

Retningslinjer for personvern

</mobile_screen>

Software for mobile is getting better.

Google Treasure Hunt 2008 – and some Google App Engine

2008-05-18T02:57:00.001+02:00

It's the Norwegian constitution day (or rather was before mid-night), so I'll recapitulate and do some stuff I have been pushing in front of me. First I went through material of SQL Server 2008 BI for a couple of hours and emptied some inboxes (removing all items is the liberating way to go). Then I stumbled over

google treasure hunt.

http://google-au.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-treasure-hunt.html

<org_post>

Arrrrrrrr you ready? Onward to the first puzzle, matey! And good luck!

aHR0cDovL3RyZWFzdXJlaHVudC5hcHBzcG90LmNvbS8=

</org_post>

I got 55x56 and my answer is Here is 4926360926504692838778xxxxxxxxxx (I will not give the actual answer).

The answer was correct (actually I was lucky), so I'm in the contest:
(
Your email address: spam.me@live.com
Your question: 55 x 56
Your answer: 4926360926504692838778…
Time received: 2008-05-18 00:24:53.803640 UTC

Correct answer: 4926360926504692838778…
Your answer was: Correct

Your answer was correct! Congratulations, you're part-way there.
There will more questions over the coming weeks, and the first person to answer them all correctly will win a prize, so keep trying!
)

Hope I get the time to follow this up.

I also added "Google App Engine", "Google Treasure Hunt" and "python site:codeplex.com" to my list of google alerts. Once a week, of course, play time is sparse.
http://code.google.com has got to wait for now.

I am amazing

2008-05-08T22:11:00.003+02:00

My first gig.

Hope this works.

Business Intelligence VPC Release 6

2008-05-01T22:43:00.002+02:00

Moved:
http://information-management-enabled.blogspot.com/2008/05/business-intelligence-vpc-release-6.html

Enable auto-logon

2008-05-01T21:42:00.002+02:00

Moved:
http://information-management-enabled.blogspot.com/2008/05/enable-auto-logon.html

Disable shutdown event tracker warning

2008-05-01T17:56:00.003+02:00

Moved:

http://information-management-enabled.blogspot.com/2008/05/disable-shutdown-event-tracker-warning.html

Coconuts and seeded grapes

2008-04-29T23:31:00.003+02:00

If you can't see the picture: stop reading, you are wasting your time.
img src=xksd.com

I used to do "custom bi", creating my own import programs (in a multitude of languages with more technologies than I care to recall), using Excel and print outs for analysis.

I now do Microsoft BI.

Loose analysis of Gartners quadrant should place custom BI close to coconuts (bellow to the left of the visible range) and MS BI close to the seeded grapes (moving towards peaches).

Gorm Braarvig

SQL Server - Drop database, drop current connections first

2008-04-29T23:12:00.002+02:00

Moved:
http://information-management-enabled.blogspot.com/2008/04/sql-server-drop-database-drop-current.html

Hello From World!

2008-04-29T22:58:00.001+02:00

This is a test posting from Word 2007. Last time I tried this was while Word was in beta and blogspot had an extension for this. Wonder what happened to the extension.

This is very nice! Word/blogger rocks!

Gorm Braarvig

SQL Server 2005: High definition timer (technical)

2008-04-26T13:46:00.011+02:00

Moved:
http://information-management-enabled.blogspot.com/2008/04/sql-server-2005-high-definition-timer.html

Performance Point 2007 CTP3 Virtual Server 2005 Implementation

2007-06-29T01:03:00.000+02:00

Please diregard this post, this way of implementing the servers will fail due to deficencies in NewSid.exe on servers running SharePoint!

I'll fix it later.

Performance Point 2007, Virtual Server 2005
part 1

Warning: You need a 2GB+ machine for this; I use 3GB x64 SCSI and this is prefered, it is not really a laptop with USB disks excercise.

1. Goal
2. Plan
3. Implementation
4. Test
5. Conclusion

1. Goal
Set up PPS multi-server as virtual server images with a dedicated domain: perf.local

2. Plan
a) Set up standard base image
b) Set up domain controller
c) Decide what servers shall be implemented
d) Set time of completion
e) Blog this
f-) Implement servers
x) Implement client

3. Implementation

3a) Set up standard base image
I decided to use Virtual PC 2007 for the images, this way I can run any
combination of Virtual Server and Virtual PC since the images will work on
both. I also decided to create a standard image I can multiply.

Standard image:
Hardware: (virtual)
384MB RAM
3x73GB IDE disks
CD
2x LAN mapped to the same adapter

Software:
Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2

Configuration:
Name: SVR-PPSx
Language, keyboard: Norwegian
User names:
Administrator
ConsoleUser (Local admin with ForceAutoLogon)
IDE 0: 73GB disk:
C: 73GB boot, swap and os setup files
moved swap here, moved os setup files here, set setupdir in reg
IDE 1: 73GB disk:
E: 73GB os
IDE 2: 73GB disk
F: 20GB program files
moved %programFiles% here
G: 10GB temp
temp set here in environment
H: 13GB documents and data
"My documents" moved here
I: 20GB log and backup
J: 10GB tempdb
IDE 3: CD/DVD
D: CD on physical drive
Network adapters
0: DHCP assigned
1: 172.168.1.111, 255.255.255.0

After setting up this image I put newsid (winternals) on the desktop for
ConsoleUser so that every time I multiply it I can generate a new sid. Then I
installed .NET 2.0 and generated a new sid.

Image was shut down and .vmc file stripped for any absolute paths (don't know
if this is needed but it gives me pleasure)

Created a folder structure for my project:
.\pps\ My root folder
.\pps\base image Place to put base (mother) image
.\pps\base image\1.0 Copy of base image in case I need more than one base
.\pps\i Installation files for windows, sql, pps, newsid and more
.\pps\old I will need this for earlier ctps and more as time passes
.\pps\pps 0 dc Image files for dc goes here

Then I moved and copied the files around and that is enough for one day. L8r.

3b) Set up domain controller
todo

3c) Decide what servers shall be implemented
todo

3d) Set time of completion
todo

3e) Blog this
todo

3f-) Implement servers
todo

3x) Implement client
todo

4. Test
todo

5. Conclusion
todo

Later,
Gorm

Access database from SQL 2005/64

2005-11-24T17:54:00.001+01:00

Moved:
http://information-management-enabled.blogspot.com/2005/11/access-database-from-sql-200564.html

OLAP defined

2005-11-11T11:44:00.000+01:00

What is this OLAP thing?
Almost a year ago, I spent an entire week on the ultimate Business Intelligence course. I have taken and passed the corresponding brainbench tests (Data warehousing and OLAP). Still I must admit that I am not confident about OLAP (especially MDX). Having lots of stuff boiling in my sub-conscious mind, I will get there eventually (maybe I am a bit slow, he he). And my guess is that any BI specialist confident about their understanding of leveraging OLAP technology, has stopped developing.

googling
Wikipedia (initially) states
“OLAP is an acronym for online analytical processing. It is an approach to quickly provide the answer to complex analytical queries.”

google define gives eg.

www.georgetown.edu/uis/ia/dw/GLOSSARY0816.html
On-line retrieval and analysis of data to reveal business trends and statistics not directly visible in the data directly retrieved from a data warehouse. Also known as multidimensional analysis

www.intoweb.co.za/it-terms.php
On-line Analytical Processing. Information analysis that pass the FASMI test: Fast Analysis of Multidimensional Information.

Aha!
FASMI: Fast Analysis of Shared Multidimensional Information. The summary description of OLAP applications used in The OLAP Report, and now very widely referenced elsewhere.
http://www.olapreport.com/fasmi.htm: We think that the FASMI test is a reasonable and understandable definition of the goals OLAP is meant to achieve.

Definition
So, here some of my own definitions (it depends on what angle you want to see it, of course):
OLAP (personal): An interesting possibility I would like to be more involved with.
OLAP (informative): A tool for converting data into actable information.
OLAP (technical): Information analysis that is fast, statistical, multi-dimentional, ad hoc, secure and built on a large amount of data.
OLAP (for the dba): All the groupings and aggregates you can do on a dataset precalculated.
OLAP (measurable): Analysis leveraging a tool that passes the FASMI test.

(F)ast
Tools must give most answers in less than five secounds

(A)nalysis
It should be possible to add value to the data, converting it to information, being data mining, statistical formulas, score-carding, exception alerting or other special applications

(S)hared
Integrate into the security model and following any complaience requirements

(M)ultidimentional
This is not hard to understand: it must take into account more than two measures at a time, eg. the three or four: "what is it", "where is it", "when is it" and possibly "is it".

(I)nformation
Much information. It must be able to gather, manage and use much information.

Thanks
Thanks goes to two undisputed geniuses
Reed Jacobsen, genius, Hitachi
Kamal Hathi, Lead Program Manager (=genius) for SQLIS (DTS/ETL) (SQL Server 2005) and (Lead, I think) Program Manager for OLAP (SQL Server 2006+), Microsoft

Hardware problems solved, for now...

2005-11-08T18:37:00.000+01:00

Hardware problems… I called Dell, complaining of my servers loss of a hard drive. The support technician suggested that I turned off the machine and took the SCSI cables out and back in. Said that the cables could have fallen out while in Transport.

I was not convinced. Turning off a new production server to do this sounded to far fetch for me. Still he (finally) convinced me that this was a good idea. IT WORKED!. I have always told people that Dell has a flawless record by my account. No more. If you miss putting the cables in the disks (so that they fall out after a few days in operation), you can’t say you have made a server.

Still I am back with my AJAX server. While it lasts.

Aaaaaaaaaah What a day!

2005-11-07T16:53:00.000+01:00

Aaaaaaaaaah. What a day!
I don’t have MSDN
My hard disk is totally gone.

MSDN: misplaced order!
Today is the official release of VS2005 and SQL2005. Products I have used for 5 percent of my life. But, not having MSDN, I can’t get my hands on the RTM bits. I used to have MSDN, but forgot to renew it, since I was testing betas of the products I used. I saw this coming a couple of weeks ago, so I called MSDN and ordered my MSDN team architect version (or whatever). Every day since, I have asked the invoice department if they have paid the bill. Every day the same answer: We haven’t seen any bill!
So, it turns out, MSDN has misplaced (what ever that word means) my order. This means that while every MSDN subscriber on the planet gets to play with the release, I have to wait.

Hardware problems, I hope, follow up
I lost contact with my native web database server on Sunday. Black-screen. Please insert boot device. This is the 2nd time this year.

Tomorrow will be better. I’m missing webcast of the release. I will watch the recordings. I will lose a day, but, having worked with SQL Server for quite a while and learning about it in all possible ways except visiting the team or SQL PASS. I guess I will just lose this one day.

Good night.

Hardware problems, I hope

2005-11-06T14:42:00.000+01:00

Hardware.
I hate being stroked out by hardware. I have this web server I have written (from scratch in a way). But I experience heavy downtime. The last time the disk was physically destroyed. I was certain it was hackers, but when I got to the machine, it complained about not having any boot device…

Upside.
I try to look at the bright side of everything, but hardware failure is a crusher. The only solution I know of is buying more expensive hardware. That costs money. To get the money, you need attention in a budget. To get a budget you need to show some earned value for the amount spent. To show some value of things not crashing you need to see what happens when things go wrong. It is hard to see the bright side of hardware failure.

Hackers.
It is difficult to see how hackers make any contribution to anything. By hackers, I don’t mean the people that makes the tools (say satan or netscan) I mean the average computer users that uses the tools to try to destroy other peoples lives. They are not revolutionaries, they are human bugs.

Hope it was hardware this time too, I will find out tomorrow. Til then, don’t expect anything from my webserver.

Move it all into your new home. Sql 2005.

2005-11-04T13:35:00.000+01:00

Data conversion.
Get your data into SQL Server 2005, where it belongs.

Q: How do I get the data I have extracted from [some system] into SQL Server 2005?

TSql OpenRowset.

If your source system talks OLEDB (they all do), I would prefer OPENROWSET.
-- Snippet for Access
EXEC sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1
GO
RECONFIGURE
GO
EXEC sp_configure 'Ad Hoc Distributed Queries', 1
GO
RECONFIGURE
GO
SELECT * FROM OPENROWSET('Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0', 'x:\dir\mymdb.mdb';'admin';'',objectname)
GO
-- EoSnippet for access

Integration Services

If you need to clean your data, or take data from many types of systems and combine them, you can use Integration Services. This takes some work to be done properly (it looks like programming like DTP is here, but it is not quite there jet). Here you can script (or low-level create, for that matter) your own components using the AI stuff you use in your day to day programs (kidding)

Import program

If you are happy with neither OPENROWSET nor SSIS for some reason, often I’m not, you have still a few ways other ways of doing it.
- Writing a CLR Stored Procedure is the COOL way to do it. Showing off your tech skills.
- Using bcp might be the DBA way of doing it.
- Use the OLEDB provider in Delphi, ODBC with C/C++ or even JDBC with Java will work. (I’ve tried the two OLEDB, anyway)
But the best way is to create a Forms app and ADO.NET (in my not so humble opinion). You can do the max of it by reading and writing data at the same time (storing the intermediate in memory), but that would be like re-eventing the SSIS(DTS) wheel. No, just relax and insert your data with ADO.NET (actually, I am not an expert on ADO.NET, because I need to know all the other stuff too. It’s an obsession)

Happy processing and create SSIS packages for the lot. Even if you don’t need to hit the “Data Flow”-button or use the log capabilities.

SQL XML (Re: SQL cursors: This was a funny one)

2005-11-02T12:12:00.001+01:00

Moved:
http://information-management-enabled.blogspot.com/2005/11/sql-xml-re-sql-cursors-this-was-funny.html

Rootkit distributed by SONY

2005-11-01T09:30:00.000+01:00

If you run a 32-bit OS, don’t play copy protected music from SONY on your PC.
If you run 64-bit Windows XP or 64-bit Windows Server 2003, you are more likely to be safe.

http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html

SONY distributes a rootkit!
You might allready have a rootkit (colllection of hidden programs) on your PC that is eating up your CPU cycles if you have played a copy-protected CD from SONY.

If the system of the free market does not adjust this kind of behavior, I will study economics and go into politics!

This shows that it is important to have technical competent advisors high up in the large enterprises, I for one reacted impulsively to this as decision-making without knowing the technology you rely on. SONY should never have taken this risk, it is overly aggressive. It will no doupt be a costly mistake.

-web-database-server OH YEAH database-web-server-

2005-10-29T16:57:00.000+02:00

Oh yeah.
Heard about a web database server?
Or a database web server?
Take a look at mine, a mean machine search server (made for AJAX solutions).

Test bed for 32-bit version and a URI for searching for “microsoft” in Norway:
http://searchpalette.com/g/g.html
http://searchpalette.com/SPaletteGorm/0/25/microsoft

My 64-bit version searching from 10Million records getting page 25 of people called “Bil” with page size 25.
http://62.89.36.69/spalette/24/25/bil
Outputing an unbelievable 3151 bytes (scripts not included) for representing 25 persons with address and all phone numbers in a millisecond (before it gets to the router).

See it in AJAX action. Type “bil” at http://firmakatalogen.com/ and hit page 9. The 1400-1500 bytes needed to represent the hits should come more or less instantly after you let go of the mouse button. If not, it is a network latency problem.

The server, working on a XEON 64 takes up 50MB RAM for serving 5GB of raw data. I guess I could have a hundred of them on the same (single processor) machine. Integration is done with SQL Server 2005 (and has been done for about a year now in production, hope I am not breaking NDAs etc. etc. but it was the best solution, so I did it)

Well, my 64-bit webservices database server will be even more fun.

Thank you, Microsoft and Intel.

SQL cursors: This was a funny one

2005-10-29T16:34:00.001+02:00

Moved:
http://information-management-enabled.blogspot.com/2005/10/sql-cursors-this-was-funny-one.html

Hardcore Programming (dis)cont

2005-10-21T16:02:00.000+02:00

This is posted from Word.

Hardcore Programming cont. will have to wait. I needed to put my AJAX database webservices server on 64-bit. Seems to work. HTTP.SYS was a real drag (with the newest platform SDK), so I had to do LoadLibrary and GetProcAddress on the lot. Hopefully it will pay itself at some point in the future.

Also, the SysWOW64 puzzled me a bit

Have a nice weekend
Yours, Gorm Braarvig

Hardcore Programming cont.

2005-10-16T18:03:00.001+02:00

Moved:
http://information-management-enabled.blogspot.com/2005/10/hardcore-programming-cont.html

2005-10-16T16:36:00.000+02:00

Hardcore programming
Okay, Windows 2003 SP1/64.
I am coming to get you.

1. "Hello 64 bit World." console
Should be a no-brainer

2. "Delay with cancel" multi-threaded
Without RTL of any kind.
Hope this is possible with the new compiler/linker
Destination release exe should be bellow 2KB
What kind of structure and segment alignments can I have?
What does it look like in the hex-editor?
If I get dependends.exe to run, will be interesting to see what dlls are needed to run a windows program

3. "malloc the hell out of the machine"
Application that uses more than 2GB continuos RAM.
Long lived dream of mine.

OK. time to start.
G.