Voice of the DBA

Category: Blog

  • Smart Car Charging

    I don’t know if electric cars are the answer, but I do think electricity will play a larger part of how we move things around in the future. Overall it’s more efficient, if we can figure out how to generate it well, and also provide it to vehicles in an efficient manner.

    This article on smart car charging is fascinating to me. It essentially moves the cost of the power from the owner of the outlet providing the power, to the person using the power. I don’t know how feasible this is, or how much it would cost to deploy this in the US, but it’s a good idea.

    Smart charging a Volvo

     

    I am, however, concerned about the security implications. How many people will attempt to hack this and charge others? How much of a legal issue will we have with disputes?

  • A Solid Laser Printer

    41RaggnhBzL._SL500_AA300_I bought a Brother 2060 about 5 years ago to serve as our primary printer at the ranch. It was a basic, compact, black and white laser that did a good job for us. It seems as though we’ve had it forever, and I’ve only replaced the toner once. We don’t print a ton, but it’s been a very solid printer.

    In that time, we’ve had an HP inkjet, and an Epson Workforce 610 Inkjet all in one that currently works fine, but is very flaky on the network. We’ve been reduced during the last week to saving images to a flash drive and plugging that into the Epson.

    That’s because the old Brother seemed to die. The feed for paper (auto or manual) just won’t pull paper in, and so the machine doesn’t print.

    I asked for a few recommendations from Twitter. I was thinking to bite the bullet and get a color laser, which might replace both printers, and keep the Epson as a spare. We don’t print a lot, but the kids sometimes need color for school stuff, and we definitely need something to print out the occasional document. Usually so we can tackle the process using the antiquated fax method.

    We looked at a few recommendations and were considering the a Brother color laser, but it felt wrong to spend $300 for something that we rarely need. I’d rather fuss with the inkjet when we need it, or even buy new ink.

    So we settled on the Brother 2270, pictured above. It’s a low end printer, for $120, and hopefully it will last as long as our previous one.

  • AdventureWorks in SQL Server 2012 RC0

    The sample databases for SQL Server 2012 haven’t been completely finalized, but I was able to find the latest version here for AdventureWorks. This download gives you an mdf, and that’s it. You can’t directly attach that in SSMS, but you can use T-SQL to do it.

    CREATE DATABASE ADVENTUREWORKS

    ON (FILENAME = ‘c:\SQLdata\ADventureWorks2008R2_data.mdf’)

    FOR ATTACH_REBUILD_LOG

    You get a note that the log file is invalid from the MDF, but a new log is created and you have your sample databases attached.

  • Azure is Down

    I saw a note about an outage on Windows Azure, apparently one that’s been going on for seven hours. Once again it seems that February 29 has struck again with a computer issue, and it makes me worry that if we mess with daylight savings time, we might have similar issues in the future.

    I went to the main Azure page, and this is what I saw

    azuredown

    I wrote about cloud computing today, and higher salaries. While this isn’t good news for the cloud, perhaps it means that salaries will be even higher.