Author: way0utwest

It seems to rear it’s ugly head more and more these days. Once again I found some content from my site republished on another site, without permission, and without a link.

I can’t speak for others, but if I knew you were plagiarizing content, I wouldn’t hire you. I believe in second chances, but if i were interviewing you, I’d question you on it, and I would definitely rate you lower than other candidates. I’d also realize that I need to interview you harder since I would suspect that any of your accomplishments in the past might not be your accomplishments.

And if I were pressed for time to hire, and couldn’t quiz you harder than the average candidate, I wouldn’t hire you.

It’s that simple, at least for me. If you’ve copied content, then my trust in your abilities has been lost, and I would need to rebuild that trust. Which means extra work on you part (and mine) and likely a lack of good assignments, important assignments or projects, more supervision, and lower bonuses.

Don’t copy content, and don’t plagiarize. It doesn’t do your brand any good.

Someone asked an interesting question recently. If they had this code:

if OBJECT_ID(‘aa’) is not null
   drop table aa
create table aa (id int identity(1,1))
go
set identity_insert aa on
insert aa (id) select -10 union select -11
set identity_insert aa off

insert aa default values

select * from aa

drop table aa

The results look like this:

That doesn’t seem right. In fact, I would assume that you would have –10, –11, and 1 as the values. However it doesn’t work.  Why?

It’s a bug. This is actually listed on Connect, and marked as “resolved”, which makes me think that the code has been marked for SQL 11 and corrected.

You can change the identity value. Look at this code:

if OBJECT_ID(‘aa’) is not null
   drop table aa
create table aa (id int identity(1,1))
go
set identity_insert aa on
insert aa (id) select 8
set identity_insert aa off

insert aa default values

select * from aa

drop table aa

It returns 8, and 9, because when you insert a specific value for the identity that is large than the current value, the current value is set to the inserted value.

I’ve used lots of identities, but never messed with negative values, so this surprised me. There’s no reason why you can’t use them, just be aware that if you start an empty table with SET IDENTITY_INSERT on, you could end up skipping the “1".

From the PASS 2010 Summit Survey: 29% of people want a presentation on backup compression. OK, here it is.

Turn it on:

Turn it off:

That’s it. If you want to script it, go here.

I saw Brent Ozar’s (blog, twitter) interpretation of the PASS Summit Survey and he had a great comment on more people asking for Backup Compression than Filestream, TDE, or Spatial. He noted: “ If I was the product manager for those last three features, I’d be dunking my head in the toilet right now, because that’s just depressing.”

I’m not sure I’d feel that way. Maybe I’d feel more like banging my own head against the wall, or perhaps wandering over to the marketing section of the Microsoft campus and banging someone else’s head against a wall. Or two.

I’m being a little silly. There could be more of a presentation on backup compression. Someone could do a “shoot out” of all the products offering compression. Someone could present some data (quickly, like in 10-15 minutes) on how compression changes the resource usage on some of their real databases. Someone could go into details on effects of different data types and the level of compression reached (10 minutes), and how it works with TDE (5 minutes).

There, we’re up to 25 minutes. Maybe 27 with a slow demo.

Or maybe, someone could compress that into 15 minutes of a talk that includes data compression, and show some real world examples of how compression impacted things, and how you might change designs to use it better.

Seriously, if you are asking for a presentation on how backup compression works, you’re in one of two situations. Either you are smart enough to delve into details and maybe you should go work for Microsoft (or Red Gate or Quest), or you need to just crack open BOL. Look, I’ll give you a bookmark.

Tia thinks I’m crazy to book early, but I like to have a choice of flights, and I like to get things off my plate. I heard back from someone about TechEd today, so I decided to just book the trip. One less thing for me to worry about.

SQL Saturday #22 in Pensacola is the weekend before, and I am speaking there first. A few of the Red Gate people are flying to New Orleans and driving to Pensacola.

That sounds like work, so I booked two one-way flights. I arrive around 2pm in Pensacola on Friday, will speak Sat and then catch a ride back with some Red Gate people to New Orleans where I’ll spend Sun night, Mon, and Tues meeting with people before coming home early on Wed.

No sessions for me, just touching base with authors and saying hi at TechEd, so it should be a light week with the chance for me to get some work done.

I did have a fun 15 minutes wasted on the phone. I had to cancel two trips earlier this year, so I wanted to use my credit. Apparently United doesn’t issue “credit.” What they do is allow you to rebook the flight, charging you $150. However you can’t use the website to rebook the ticket. Instead you have to call an agent.

And oh yeah, they charge you $25 for the agent.

So I call, we get my account up, and 10 minutes later he says that I can rebook one flight. OK, I agree to do that. He gets my info, goes through things, and then says it’s $150 + $25 for $175 and I have $168 credit. Am I ready to book?

Holding my temper in check, I then ask can he waive the agent fee, but apparently he’s a dim bulb, reading from a script or not allowed to deviate. We go around a few times, me using logic, him passing the time reading from his script. I ask can I book two one-ways with this ticket, and get credit from my other flight. No, he can’t handle that, but his grasp of the English language isn’t great, so I hang up.

Book through Expedia, get my itinerary on my phone, just easier.

Good thing I went for a run afterwards.