If all goes well, by the time you read this on Thanksgiving I’ll be up in the mountains of Colorado. No SQL Server questions to answer, no editorials to write, no articles to edit.
I think I say it often, but it bears some repeating. Get away from your day job and enjoy the rest of your life.
Happy Thanksgiving.
I had to run our weekly conference call this week. My boss is out of the office, but he’s been trying to get everyone to participate by having different people run meetings on different weeks. I’m not the best employee in this sense, and not always prepared, so I’ve tried to avoid running one over the last few months.
That stopped today, or yesterday, as I got an email from him saying he was gone and I needed to run the meeting. So I was on the hook as I grabbed my laptop and headed down (literally) to the basement today.
I ended up doing an OK job, despite not having an agenda ready. Usually someone prepares one based on feedback, but I didn’t do that, and had even deleted the old email from my boss where I had 2 or 3 things he wanted me to cover. I covered the two main items we’d emailed about, but kept thinking I was forgetting something.
Fortunately just before I asked for Any Other Business and closed the meeting I remembered the holiday schedule was on the list and covered that.
Now we’ll see how long I can avoid being in charge of another one.
I saw a post recently about the tempdb being overly large and causing issues for a user. The person was having issues shrinking the files and wasn’t sure what to do. Someone else responded that snapshot isolation might be an issue and I found that interesting. I hadn’t thought about tempdb being a place where snapshot isolation drops things but it does. This entry in BOL says:
“The tempdb database must have enough space for the version store.”
What this seems to imply is that if your database uses row versioning it takes up space in tempdb, which might limit your ability to shrink tempdb. There’s another entry (Row Versioning Resource Usage) that seems to confirm this in that there are possible conditions where tempdb space might not be freed.
Not sure if this is something many people encounter, especially as I don’t see many people shrinking tempdb often, but it’s a good piece of trivia to keep in mind.
I haven’t done a car update in some time, and I’d like to get back to them. Surprisingly quite a few of them provoke some amazing reactions from people. Especially when I talk about my Prius.
I don’t think the Prius is for everyone, but it is a great car in a certain band of usage. I’d like to say narrow band, but I’m not so sure. It works well for my family and I think it was a fantastic investment for us. This week I took my son snowboarding one day for his birthday and we drove 100 miles to the resort, with an elevation change of probably 3,000 ft or so. We filled up the tank before we left, and reset the counters for mileage. We got back with quite a bit of gas left, and a 48mpg average. That’s pretty good in the mountains, and while I’d like to be above 50mpg, I can’t complain. Not many cars would get 48, and our pickup truck would probably be averaging 12mpg.
It seems that lots of other people like the Prius as well and Toyota is predicting it will be the top selling car in a decade. I could see that coming true as more and more people replace their cars and look to get more fuel efficient. Not because they want to be green, but because they want to save money and fuel costs are one way to do that. I do think that Toyota would need to offer other models of the Prius, perhaps even an SUV or wagon, as speculated. I think they’d even do well to have a Scion or Lexus that is “powered by Prius” to capitalize on the name and badging.
A friend asked me earlier this year if I thought a Prius was a good idea. We talked over his usage and driving and came to the conclusion it wasn’t a good move for him. I’ll probably republish that as part of an editorial here soon with the holidays in December.
I don’t know why so many people dislike the Prius. It’s a good car, and good technology, and if it fits you, then it’s worth using. If not, then find the car that better fits your life.
