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I saw this posted on Twitter, yet another reason to have a variety of people you follow. Some very interesting links and ideas get shared there.

It’s a set of IT salary charts and values from a recent survey on Datamation. The salaries look about where I expected, though the ones for database administrator managers were higher than I thought. Here’s the chart:

It has a median at $110, which is a nice number. It’s higher than the data warehouse specialist at $92k.

Note these are national averages, but they ought to remind you that IT is a good industry to work in and we are very well paid.

The SQL Rally pre-conference sessions were announced today, and congratulations to the winners. They are:

• Business Intelligence Workshop – Patrick LeBlanc, Devin Knight, Mike Davis, & Adam Jorgensen
• Query Performance Tuning, Start to Finish – Grant Fritchey
• Maximize Your SQL Server 2008 Coding Skills – Plamen Ratchev
• Leadership and Team Management Skills for the Database Professional – Kevin Kline

You can read more about each session here.

These are all great sessions, and no matter who was selected, there wasn’t a chance you’d see a bad session. Of these, I’d be likely to attend Grant’s session or the BI ones since I think those have the best chance for me to learn something that I could start to use quickly.

The voting was sent to all applicants and I was a little surprised by the results. I don’t know if I can disclose anything, so I won’t, but there was quite a disparity from first to second place in each category. I’m not sure if that’s due to much better marketing from the winners or if it reflects interest. I’d love to know more.

I’m slightly disappointed that I wasn’t selected, but I wasn’t sure how many people would really want to invest in a half day seminar for about $100 that would  help them find a new job. I’m sure their bosses wouldn’t. However the PD session from Kevin Kline is a good one, and I think it’s a better topic for many companies, who desperately need some leadership in the IT space.

I haven’t ever worried about this, but I had the need recently to check. I was looking a SQL Sentry’s Plan Explorer and the instructions mentioned that you need the .NET Framework v4.0 installed.

So I decided to check my machine. First I hit Control Panel

However that doesn’t say .NET 4.0 install. Instead it has a “client profile” listed. What does that mean?

I wasn’t confident of this, so I Google’d for the question. I found this blog on How to Check. It lists a Javascript call that you can paste into IE or Firefox.

javascript:alert(navigator.userAgent)

I get this from Firefox:

and this from IE:

Again, .NET4 is listed, but not with a CLR component. So I’m not sure what I have.

Then I went over to Stack Overflow to check. I would this answer, and it lists registry keys. I checked mine and I see this:

 

So do I have .NET 4.0 or not? At this point I’m still not since it’s hard to determine if I really have the CLR needed. So I decide to just install Plan Explorer and look for error messages.

Pow! Apparently the client profile isn’t enough. So I downloaded the .NET 4 Framework from the link at SQLSentry and then saw this:

.NET Framework extended, which matches the result from IE:

Now I can go play with SQL Sentry’s Plan Explorer. It certainly look cool!

Someone posted a note asking how they might restore if the disk that contained their transaction log crashed. I replied that if they had the data files on a separate drive, they could detach/attach, build a new log file, and move on.

Apparently that’s wrong.

If the database is not shut down cleanly, you can’t do a detach/attach. The database will not attach, and you’ll be restoring from backups. It seems that you have a better chance of recovering all your data with a full backup and a loss of the data discs rather than a loss of the log disks.

A good thing to know. If you are trying to figure out a log backup strategy, make sure you truly are accounting for the amount of data loss you can tolerate. If you lose disks, you’re going to need those backups.