Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

The Desktop Rebuild–Part 3
This is the last part of this series, at least for now. If you haven’t seen Part 1 and Part 2, feel free to check them out.

After I got through Part 2, I was working again. In fact, I continued to chocotaley install a few things, but for the most part, I could get productive quickly, working on writing, email, even code. I did install Visual Studio, SQL, and SSMS by hand, mostly to be sure they were the right versions I needed.

However, things weren’t great. The two monitors I showed from Part 2 were OK, but the not great. I missed my third monitor, especially when I had the second one in portrait more. I decided I needed to just upgrade things again. Not everything, just the video card.

I tried my two older cards, shown below, in various combinations, but every time I added them to the motherboard, I couldn’t boot. Remove them, and things worked again. After 4-5 tries, I thought it was time to abandon this path.

I’ve been stretching my budget slightly. I’ve had a few expenses here, and while this is tax deductible, it still costs real money. I got a few recommendations for video cards, including this Quadro K1200, which looked great. However, another $300 right now would likely get my wife a bit more upset than I’d like.

I looked around the Internet a few times at night and found some other cards that would support 3 monitors, at a more reasonable cost. In the end, I decided to switch from ATI to NVidia and got a EVGA GeoForce GT740 card with two DVI and one mini HDMI out. Quite a few people had used this for workstations and it seemed to support 3 monitors well.

This was a large card, and the first one I’ve ever owned that needed its own power connections. Hardware has changed. This is also a card with 4GB of memory, which is a long way from the first computer I built after college that had 4MB of main memory.

Installing the card was easy. It slipped in, I connected it to power and my desktop booted right up. Well, I had a CMOS error, but I cleared things and then it booted. The mini-HDMI cable was a tight fit, but I managed to get it in there.

One note on cables, go longer. I got a 3ft mini-HDMI to HDMI and it wasn’t quite long enough. I had to rearrange monitors a bit, which is OK, but I should have just gotten a 6 foot cable and then secured the extra.

I downloaded the NVidia driver before I’d shut down the machine, so I booted to a single monitor, installed the driver, and things worked right away. I configured things and ended up going with a 3 monitor config that has the center one in portrait mode.

It’s been a few days and so far everything looks and works great. I’ve rebooted a few times, taken the desk up and down multiple times, and connections are solid, hardware is working, and I can get back to getting work done.

I ran a test using UserBenchMark and got great scores everywhere but video and then only for gaming. Overall, this is a much faster machine, and seems to work smoother. I’ve had zero issues with the hardware and Windows 10 seems more stable since the fresh installation.

My Windows Experience Index also changed dramatically. The old machine was a 5.1, mainly due to graphics, with the other scores in the low 8s. The new score is 7.9, with graphics holding things back, but I have a third monitor now and more CPU and RAM resources.

Summary

Here are the changes I made. Note I’m not recommending these items. I got some recommendations from Glenn Berry, and they worked well for me. This stuff changes often, so check with friends and do your own research.

Old
- MB – Gigabyte, circa 2010-ish
- 24GB RAM
- 256 boot SSD, 512 SSD, 2x1TB HDD
- ATI 512MB RAM graphics card, circa 2010
- ATI 1MB graphics card, circa 2012
- Corsair 600W power supply
New

ASRock Extreme6 motherboard – $109 (after rebate)

Intel i7-6700k – $269

32GB Memory – $50

Cooling fan – $30

EVGA Video – $110

That’s $620 for a fairly substantial upgrade.

I’m pretty happy for now, and I suspect this will last for some time. If I change anything, it will be adding another graphics card because I need video stuff (or I buy Doom 4) and getting a larger power supply.
June 29, 2016
Come to IT/Dev Connections–July Sale

You can register for IT/Dev Connections in October and save this weekend with the July Sale. Use code: JULYSALE.

I’ll be speaking, though I’m not sure which sessions will be chosen. This year the conference is going to be on Oct 10-13 in Las Vegas at the Aria, which is a great hotel and centrally located on the strip. It’s also got great conference wi-fi, which is still amazing to me.

The event is a great way to get exposure to a bunch of technologies, with Visual Studio, SQL Server, ASP.NET, C#, Azure, Exchange, and more being covered. I find myself taking advantage of the time to get some sessions in on non-SQL Server topics, learning things I might not otherwise get exposure to. The All Access pass also allows you to get online access to sessions and take a pre-con.

If you’re looking for some intense learning, and you wear a lot of hats, check out IT/DevConnections as a possible way to learn a few things this fall.

June 29, 2016
Email or Username

Quite a few of us will work with application databases where we need to identify a particular user for working with the various parts of the application. I’m not talking about the authentication and verification of identity, but just having a token to identify a user once they’ve been authenticated. I don’t want to talk security here since most of you aren’t great at building these systems and should just implement an authentication scheme that’s been vetted (OAuth, Live, etc).

However, once you get a way of authenticating a user, how do you identify them in the database? Many people store a username, but there are issues with these. They aren’t consistent across systems, a user might find theirs taken in one application, and then needs a second one for the next application. This leads to the complexity of people needing a way to retrieve their username, which can be a whole separate set of application programming pain. Often the default is to move back to an email associated with the username.

However what does someone do when they don’t have access to that email? Therein lies the issue with using email as an authentication mechanism. I use my sqlservercentral.com email for many things, most of them related to this site. However, if I were to ever leave this job, then I wouldn’t be able to access some sites if I couldn’t remember the login information. Perhaps I shouldn’t be using this email, but there are some services that are related to both my career as a DBA/developer as well as my position here at SQLServerCentral.

Plenty of people have a separate email for personal use, but not necessarily many users of a generic application. There are plenty of people using their work email for registration at sites, assuming they’ll always have access to the application through a username of some sort. You might even change your email, deciding at some point that coolteenager@hotmail.com isn’t the one you want to give out for your kid’s school registration. In that case, if you’ve used that email at a variety of places, then what can you do?

PASS recently changed to using email instead of username, which is fine. I think more sites use email, but in our case, as DBAs and developers, are emails less likely to change? Should we be sure that our PASS email is always a non-corporate email so that we can keep membership as we change employers? I’d think username is more stable for people in technology, and it can be fun. I love my way0utwest moniker, and try to ensure I reserve it on many applications I may want to use.

There’s no good answer here, and there are issues with using either one as an identifier, but what do you think? Are there compelling reasons to choose one over the other? No matter which one you use, I think the need to have multiple ways for users to gain access to their account is important.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.5MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

June 29, 2016
Better Explorer on High dpi Displays

I’ve got a high dpi display on my laptop. The recommended resolution is 2560×1704. That’s small. I have had all kinds of issues with SSMS, VS, and various other applications, including a few from Redgate.

The other day I was looking at the Explorer window from about 2 feet away and struggling to see some of the icons and filenames as the light faded one afternoon. I found I could barely make out some icons and found myself leaning forward to see and back to type. Getting older has really made this annoying.

I found an article that helped, letting me adjust the title bars and icon sizes in Explorer. I bumped up the sizes for title bars, menus, and icons. Everything went to 12 or 14, from the 9 or 10 points that are the defaults.

Now I can read my Explorer window better. If you’re struggling with the higher resolution displays, give this a try. It’s hard to tell in the screenshot, but things are much easier to read now.

June 29, 2016