Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Denver SQL Server User Group Holiday Party

    Tonight was the 2010 Denver SQL Server User group party. I typically haven’t done in the past to the holiday meetings since they aren’t usually well attended, and time is vey valuable. However this year the meeting was being held at a local bowling alley, and I decided to go.

    It started early, at 5, and attendance was sparse at first, but by 6 we had about 20 or so people there. It was a mixed group, and a number of people I didn’t know. I didn’t bowl, mostly because throwing that ball hurts my fingers, but also because I’m not good and wanted to network more.

    A couple hours of time for me, the chance to catch up with people I haven’t seen since our SQL Saturday, and little SQL talk. This was definitely one of the better holiday parties I’ve attended in the past.

    Of course, being a geek, I  listened to Paul Randal talk Backups and CheckDB on the ride over and back.

  • Insert_Identity Permissions

    Despite my joking with Aaron Bertrand on Twitter that his suggestion on Connect got voted down because he’s Canadian, I think he has a great point with a hole in Books Online. He wrote a nice blog on the item, and it’s one you ought to consider voting up if you agree.

    I voted it up, and I think this is the type of half-*ssed documentation that is strewn throughout Books Online. While it’s a great document, and has a lot of information, it’s not always clear what is meant, and there are often holes. Most items have permissions listed, but not all, and even those that do are not clearly written or even correct.

    In my mind, the ability to change the identity values on a table ought to be either explicitly a permission that is given to users (GRANT IDENTITY_INSERT on xx to yy) or it ought to be included with the INSERT permission. There isn’t really anything here that’s altering a schema. It’s an insert permission for a user, that explicitly needs to put in a value, perhaps to close a sequence, or fix a failed insert. There’s no reason to require any elevated permission for this action.

    In any case, having the documentation clearer, even if it doesn’t behave as I’d expect it, is something I think is worth voting for.

  • Hyper-V Guests

    Virtualization has really changed the way that we deal with software. It seems that more and more often I find people using virtualization for all sorts of systems, both production and non-production servers. The ability to run multiple operating systems on a single physical host means that systems are used more efficiently. It also means that more people have the ability to experiment with alternatives to the standard Windows OS that so many of us use.

    Hyper-V has gained a lot of attention over the last few years as Microsoft has tried to get people to run this hypervisor.  It seems that quite a few people have had success running Hyper-V, and it becomes more popular all the time. However, not everyone is happy, and I found a  post about Linux support in Hyper-V, or the lack thereof.

    Whether Microsoft is mis-representing their support is one thing, but this did have me thinking about a wider issue. As we build more and more systems that are virtualized, or even composed of services offered by other vendors, to what extent should the vendor provide support? Is it reasonable to say that your platform works with software x, y, and z, even if you don’t have engineers trained to support the software?

    This could become a large pain point in the future for other types of platforms, as I am sure it will continue to be an issue with hypervisors.  I’m not sure I would expect a hypervisor vendor to offer full  support for various guest operating systems, but I certainly would expect that they would work with engineers at other companies to solve issues, especially if I have a support contract.

    Steve Jones

  • Thanksgiving Bloopers

    I’m slow to get this out, but I finally rendered the raw bloopers from November. Enjoy.

    http://www.youtube.com/v/17QmYLXaDE0?fs=1&hl=en_US

    Part 1

    http://www.youtube.com/v/JwFBT2etgXE?fs=1&hl=en_US

    Part 2

    Part 3