Author: way0utwest

I feel like I have some bad digital karma lately. In the past week I’ve had these downed systems:

• iPod iTouch
• Lenovo Laptop
• Acer laptop
• Windows Home Server

To be fair the Windows Home Server died just before we went to the UK and I hadn’t had time to mess with it. But it seems that almost everything I touch lately is dying.

Sometimes that’s how it goes with hardware.

It’s a little better now. Both laptops are working, and the Home Server is back online. The iPod is working, though it’s still at OS 2.1.2 instead of 3.1.3, which was my hope. Oh well, I think a Genius Bar call is in order next week.

The Home server consumed a few hours as I tried to diagnose which drive was down. I pulled them all out, dropped them in my external SAT harness and the 1TB was readable. That was cool, and I copied off my data. However the 2TBs weren’t.

I tried both laptops, x64 and x86, and neither of them would read the drive. I mucked around a bit before giving up and just putting them back in one at a time to see which one was working.

The iPod was more annoying. I tried the upgrade and it bricked. It wouldn’t restore on that machine, so I used a second machine to restore it as a new iPod, then tried the upgrade again. Same result. It’s unbricked, and synced again, but not upgraded, and that annoys me. I’ll call Apple next week.

The laptops are more interesting. I was trying to clone a drive and get an SSD into one of them, so I was moving around drives between laptops. I managed to get in a state where neither of them would boot, but I put everything back and managed to get them working.

I also got the SSD installed, with a post coming up on that experience.

You can only have one mirror of a SQL Server database in SQL Server 2005/2008. I researched that last year when someone asked the question. It didn’t make sense to me why you couldn’t have more than one, and I struggled to find documentation, but finally Paul Randal pointed me to a reference.

And recently in his myth a day series, he posted this as a note in there as well. His recommendation, which is one that I’ve used as well, is include log shipping as a secondary way of moving data, and introduce a delay.

Since mirroring sends transactions from the log to be replayed on another machine, why couldn’t you have two or more mirrors? I don’t think there’s a theoretical reason, though if you were in high safety mode, you might cause delays on your principle with the two phase commit.

However for now, each database can have at most one mirror. I wonder if that will change (I hope so) in SQL 11.

The RTM date is out for SQL Server 2008 R2. At the UK Tech Days it was released as May 21 of this year, so my guess it’s pretty much done and there’s a little fit and finish work to be completed.

I’m surprised that they can announce that date now. Wouldn’t it be done when it’s done? I’d think that you wouldn’t know what was done, what bugs were in, and when it’s completed until a week or so before. Aren’t final checks and tests needed? If something’s found, then wouldn’t, or shouldn’t that delay things?

I’m not sure why we make a big deal of getting this done. If it RTM’d today, we could still have launch events over the next few months. It isn’t like anyone is really going to stand in line at a store to buy it and deploy it today.

RTM it when it’s done, throw a party for the development/test groups, and then let us get it when we can. We’ll appreciate that more.

One of my 2010 goals is to really increase my SSRS knowledge. I’ve used SSRS in a cursory manner over the years, but never really delved into building complex reports and trying new things. So I decided to fix that and work my way through some articles and books on the product.

A new VM, setup just for this, lives. It’s in place and ready for me to begin building reports and growing knowledge.

Now I just need a good db with some interesting stats 😉