Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

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
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
Better ReadyRoll Script Naming

One of the things that I like about ReadyRoll is that the product will automatically build new scripts that are named in a sequential order. This usually results in a few scripts that look like this:

As you can see, these scripts aren’t very intuitive. In fact, if you get lots of scripts, this starts to look fairly complex and confusing. What about something more like this:

That’s easier to read and understand. I’d also have a better idea of what happens in each script. How can I do this? It’s easy.

Add an Object

First, let’s add an object in ReadyRoll. I’ll alter my Exams table to add a few columns. To keep this simple, imagine I want to add a modified date and a short description. I could do this in SSMS, but I’ll open the designer in VS. Here’s the table.

I’ll make my changes.

Now, I click the “Update” button in the upper left. When I do this, I get a Generate script item. I could do other things, but I like to do this and see my script before applying it to the dev database.

I click Generate, and I get the script. Notice, it’s named with some random number (after the 0004) on the right.

If I right click the script, I can do all the normal file operations.

Let’s give this a more descriptive name. It’s taken me a long time from my 8.3 name days, but I’ve learned to take advantage of file names to make them descriptive. A few bytes in a name is cheap.

That’s it.

ReadyRoll does use the first characters in front of the underscore (_) to order scripts, so I don’t want to change those. I could, but in this case, I need script 4 to come after script 2 at the very least.

After the underscore, I can do whatever I like. In this case, I can see the changes being made to my database, just reading down the scripts and seeing how things will occur. I always have the detail in the code, but at a high level, I can see the changes.

I’m sure if you adopt this technique, you’ll find that it’s much easier to manage scripts and track what’s happening to your database.

June 28, 2016